Most people are fragmented and unhappy. They lead conflicted and painful lives, driven by a variety of competing motivations and impulses. They would love to follow the advice of Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet to be true to themselves, but they just can’t do it, because Polonius’s advice only works if you really know the self to which you’re supposed to be true.
In this book, spiritual teacher Michael A. Singer, founder of the Temple of the Universe meditation center and a pioneering figure in the world of medical software, teaches you how to use your direct self-knowledge as an intuitive tool for awakening to your true identity. You’ll learn to free yourself from false identities and the suffering that goes with them, and you’ll learn to live an enlightened life of peace, joy, creativity, and divine love.
Currently, your life isn’t your own. It belongs instead to what you might think of as an “inner roommate.” You “hear” this voice as the endless flow and flux of your thoughts (“Did I turn off the coffee maker? I wonder what’s on TV tonight?”). Because the voice speaks to you as the voice of your own mind, you’ve mistakenly come to believe that it is you.
Your inner roommate hijacks your experience by babbling neurotically and narrating the world for you. It worries, argues with itself, feels guilty, criticizes others, wallows in self-pity, leaps manically from thought to thought, and generally acts like a crazy person.
Your inner roommate’s narration of your life is a defense mechanism. Your roommate feels intrinsically afraid of and antagonistic toward the world, so it tries to control it by giving you a mentally filtered model of the world to experience instead of the unpredictable world outside your mind.
The very act of noticing your roommate’s voice is the beginning of freedom from it. By simply noticing it, you disidentify from it and recognize that you are not it. Consider personifying your inner roommate externally. What does it say? How does it make you feel? Why would you ever want to give control of your life to this unstable person who continually dispenses neurotic advice about everything?
You can take charge temporarily by “speaking” to yourself with this mental voice. Try it now: Mentally shout “Hello!” and “hear” it in your mind. This is a useful centering technique for when you’re feeling overwhelmed by racing thoughts.
Realize that you don’t have to believe your inner roommate. Your inner voice isn’t reality. It’s merely a commotion about life, not life itself. Your true spiritual growth depends on not believing what your inner roommate says.
Having recognized your inner roommate and freed yourself from its pathological viewpoint, you can recognize who you really are. There’s a technique for this that’s more important than any book or mantra or holy pilgrimage. The technique is actually a question: “Who am I?” Asking this master question deeply and correctly will reveal your true identity.
Ask “Who am I?” about yourself in relation to the objective world. Your image in the mirror ages, but you don’t. Who is the you who remains the same as the outer world changes?
Ask “Who am I?” about yourself in relation to your inner, subjective world. Who is it in you that loves, fears, thinks, and dreams? Who is reading these words right now?
When you ask it truly and deeply, the master question becomes, “Who is having all of these mental, emotional, and physical experiences right now?”
To answer the master question, ask it correctly and let this direct your attention to the nature of all experiences. Then let go of the experiences and notice what’s left: the pure experiencer. You are the one who sees. You are the witness who is seated at the center of consciousness. From there, you look outward at your thoughts, emotions, and, through your physical senses, the external world. Look around the room or out the window. Wordlessly receive what you see. Notice how the experiencer encompasses the whole tableau effortlessly. You are the one who perceives all of these things and remains constant as they arise and pass away.
Now you know who you really are: You are the pure witness, the experiencer. With this established, understand that the most important thing in your actual experience of life is inner energy. This energy has laws and follows patterned behavior just like physical energy in the outer world. It behaves by surging and receding, as governed by the condition of your heart (see below). When it flows, you feel supercharged and able to take on the world. When it doesn’t, you feel drained and depressed. You can know the current state and level of your inner energy by paying attention to your relative level of vitality, enthusiasm, joy, and inspiration.
Your body contains centers or nodes, like spiritual valves, that focus and distribute this energy. Yogis call these centers chakras. Your heart chakra regulates your experience. This “spiritual heart” governs your life because it opens and closes in sync with human relationships, determining whether you can fall in love, feel inspiration, or feel enthusiasm. The only reason you don’t feel inner energy all the time is that you block it by closing your heart and mind. This blockage is your own unconscious choice, but to you it seems like it’s “just happening.”
Your spiritual heart closes because it stores up and becomes blocked by past experiences. The concept of Samskaras from the yogic tradition provides a useful handle for understanding blockages. When a blockage happens—such as when you resist the pain of a broken relationship—you initially try to process it through your mind, and when that doesn’t work, it gets transferred to your heart, where it generates emotions. When you then resist it in your heart, your heart puts it in deep storage, where it becomes a Samskara, an “impression” from the past that runs your life. A stored Samskara becomes a trigger point that makes your heart open or close spontaneously in response to life experiences.
Your spiritual heart closes because your inner roommate tells you the lie that your inner state of openness or closedness depends on what happens in your life, so you resist unpleasant experiences and cling to pleasant ones. A buildup of such blocks affects your entire life. Now you have a vocabulary to describe your inner roommate’s problem: Its heart is filled with blockages. In a way, your inner roommate is just one, giant blockage.
For example, you may close your spiritual heart if you lose your job. Your inner roommate says you should feel sad, so this shuts you down. But then you find new work, and suddenly you’re open and energized again. The external events didn’t cause these energetic highs and lows. Rather, you unconsciously allowed your mind to use those events as triggers.
You don’t have to live at the mercy of circumstances and Samskaras. Learn to relax and release; handle Samskaras by choosing to let go of the old, stored energies whenever they come up.
Cultivate this process of spiritual purging until it becomes your default approach.
Ultimately, the best and simplest method for staying open is never to close. Closing is just a habit that you can break through training and discipline—for example, through meditation and the practice of awareness by asking the master question, “Who am I?” By remaining open and unblocked, you can improve your physical health and walk through the world with no problems. Moreover, the energy will build until it starts flowing out of you to illuminate and energize the people around you.
Just like cycles of opening and closing, for most people life is a recurrent, automatic cycle of falling into unhappiness and dysfunction and then rising back to a relative state of clarity and ease. The fall into dysfunctional unhappiness is actually a fall into unawareness. You encounter a trigger—some sight, sound, situation, or other experience that’s linked to one of the Samskaras stored in your heart (such as the smell of the perfume your ex-wife used to wear before your marriage imploded)—and this trigger pulls you down into the disturbed energy. From there, you see everything through the negative energy’s distorted haze. Eventually, the negativity plays itself out and subsides, and you rise again. However, if your life hits another blockage while you’re already fallen, and you make life decisions from that negative inner state, then a series of cascading crises can occur, resulting in a downward spiral.
You fall because you fear life and therefore resist it. You fear life because of its inherent uncertainty, so you use your mind to create a false world of static stability. But you fail to realize that with this mental ruse, you actually make the world a scary place because you define reality according to your own inner problems: What doesn’t disturb you is okay, what disturbs you isn’t okay. So you try to arrange life so that it doesn’t trigger your sense of being disturbed, and in doing this, you make life itself into a threat.
Freedom from fear is possible, and thus freedom from falling is possible. It simply means refusing to fight with life. When life inevitably hits your stored negative stuff (your Samskaras), let go of the negativity right then, because it will be harder later. You can actually learn to “fall upward” into ever more delightful levels of enlightenment. Simply surrender. Observe and allow the negative thoughts and feelings to emerge, and let your blockages and disturbances become the very fuel for your enlightenment as your act of releasing them propels you upward into clarity, peace, and joy.
Daily life is your highest spiritual path, and your choice to enjoy this life is the greatest spiritual teacher. Life itself will liberate you if you ask the right question and give the right answer. The question is, “Do I want to be happy?” The right answer is, “Yes.”
You give this right answer by practicing total nonresistance. Anytime you notice any part of yourself growing unhappy, just drop all resistance. Refuse to close your spiritual heart, no matter what happens. Imagine, for instance, that a childhood experience instilled a fear of dogs in you. You can work with this, learning to relax and have a new and enjoyable relationship with dogs. Then, whenever someone says or does something you don’t like, you can treat this the same way you’ve treated your fear of dogs: no resistance. Good areas for practicing nonresistance and dropping unhappiness include your relationships and your work.
Take a vow of unconditional happiness. Choosing to be happy through practicing nonresistance and dropping unhappiness is the surest way to awakening. It’s also the only rational response to life on this little planet spinning through a vast universe. Imagine what you could achieve if you liberated the energy you’ve devoted to resistance.
Here’s a series of helpful metaphors to clarify the application of these principles of spiritual awakening to your life in different ways.
Your daily life is like sleepwalking. You’re essentially lost in a dream: When you focus your consciousness intensely on an object, you lose your sense of self-awareness in it. This happens not just with physical objects but with mental objects (thoughts and emotions), which are often caused by outer events. It’s like being immersed in an all-encompassing movie where your thoughts and emotions move in synchronization with your sensory experiences.
The phenomenon of lucid dreaming, where you become aware that you’re in a dream, offers a useful analogy for spiritual awakening from this state of unconsciousness. You wake up in the dream of your life by learning to turn awareness back on itself. It’s like being lost in a movie for hours and then suddenly “coming to yourself” and remembering that you’re watching a fictional melodrama on a screen. You realize that the person you’ve always thought of as yourself is really just a movie titled [Insert Your Name]. Asking the master question “Who am I?” is one way to practice this discipline of self-awareness.
For true spiritual growth, you must come to peace with pain, because you’ve built your whole life on it. Imagine your pain as a thorn. It’s embedded in your arm, right on a nerve. Should you respond by removing the thorn or by making sure that nothing touches it? If you decide on the second option, protecting your pain will consume your life: You’ll build a thorn-shaped life as your daily actions revolve around shielding the painful spot.
Fortunately, you can extract your inner thorn. Use the events and encounters of your daily life as opportunities for doing this. Pay attention to your emotions, mood, and relative sense of happiness and security. When you feel a disturbance, release the initial pain right away to avoid being trapped in the long term. Learn that it’s okay to feel inner disturbances because they don’t disturb the seat of your consciousness.
The very core of spiritual work is to become comfortable and free by letting pain pass through you. If you do this, you’ll learn that in addition to stored-up pain, you also have joy, beauty, love, peace, freedom, and ecstasy inside you. They’re on the other side of the pain. You have to go through it to find them.
One way to describe your current relationship to your psyche is that you’re addicted to it. You mistakenly think your psyche protects you from pain, so you’ve devoted your life to meeting its constant demands. But in fact, your psyche is pain. It’s your crazy inner roommate. Realize that your psyche is very ill, as you know from your frequent feelings of mental and emotional disturbance.
The good news is that you can break the addiction: Wake up and realize that the trouble is in you, not the world. You can’t solve your inner problems by rearranging the outer world and getting better at external games, because external changes don’t address the root of your inner problem. Learn to notice when your mind is trying to “make everything okay,” and gently let go of this. Eventually, your practice of disciplined awareness will lead to a persistently centered consciousness. Once you’re free from your psyche’s demands, you can wake up and face each day like a vacation.
To discover the infinite reality beyond your psyche, recognize that your psyche is like a fortress or cage that you built for yourself long ago. You’ve lived in this prison for so long that you’ve mistaken it for the whole universe. You built it from thoughts and emotions, and ultimately from your self-concept, and then you turned it into a fortress. Now, you bump up against its invisible walls whenever you bump up against anything that threatens the comfort zone of your self-concept. Ultimately, you’re an infinite being, so you hit your prison walls whenever you place any finite limit on yourself.
Most people devote their lives to constantly building, rebuilding, and maintaining their prisons. In other words, they live in constant resistance to life. This attempt to “hold everything together” through clinging is a form of suffering. The very idea that you can cling is ultimately an illusion, because life inevitably flows and changes.
People who experience real spiritual awakenings wake up to the fact that they have imprisoned themselves. Instead of viewing your walls as protecting you from infinite darkness, see them as barriers that block out a beautiful, infinite light. Recognize the moments when your mental model of the world starts to crumble through inner turmoil as blessings, not threats. Let your prison collapse. Eventually, the turmoil will stop, and you’ll rest in total, blessed stillness.
Once you’re liberated, you’ll still have a self-concept and thoughts and emotions, but they’ll be just one small part of your total being. You won’t identify with them. Your only identity will be your sense of Self. Then you’ll never have to worry about anything again. You will have aligned yourself with the forces of creation, and you’ll be at rest in the infinitude of your true Being.
After learning the principles of awakening and the metaphors that help you apply it, you can expand your focus to understand the implications of these things for the profound issues of death, harmonious living, and union with God as your final, deepest identity and destiny.
You’ve already learned that unconditional enjoyment of life is the greatest spiritual teacher. As paradoxical as it may sound on the surface, you can also say that your greatest spiritual teacher is death. And you don’t have to wait until the end of your life to learn from this teacher. You can do it right now.
Death makes life precious. It changes your perspective and priorities. It makes you more bold and loving. Someone who’s truly spiritually awake doesn’t change anything about how they’ve been living when death arrives, because they’ve already been living fully in the bliss of nonresistance and unconditional happiness.
To practice the teaching of death, simply change how you do your everyday activities and how much of you is present for them. Appreciate literally everything, from walking and breathing to arguments and good food (or even bad food). When troubles occur, put them in perspective by thinking of death. For inspiration, study the words and actions of the great spiritual teachers who have fully embraced death.
The Chinese concept of the “Tao” represents the way of balance and moderation, what we can call the middle way. All the great spiritual traditions teach it under various names. When you align yourself with the middle way of the Tao and trust its gentle guidance, your life effortlessly flows along the highest path.
To understand the Tao, understand that the extreme ends of anything are like the opposite ends of a pendulum swing. In the idiom of Taoism, these extremes are the yin and the yang, representing earth and heaven, female and male, darkness and light, weakness and strength, softness and hardness, passivity and aggression. The principle of complementary opposites, and of a middle way that holds them together in balance, threads its way through all phenomena.
Most people’s lives are stressful and difficult because they ride daily pendulum swings from side to side as they allow events to disturb them. But such struggles are unnecessary. Remember what you’ve already learned about rising and falling: You can learn to rise by cooperating with the events and energies of life instead of resisting them. This is the act of aligning with the Tao. It doesn’t require effort. Instead, just let any unbalanced energy balance itself by practicing what you’ve learned about dropping resistance, unhappiness, and negativity so that you begin to “fall upward.”
When you align with the Tao and learn to rest in it, you uncover vast reservoirs of energy and efficiency. It’s like sailing a boat. Multiple forces and factors are in play, and they all come together harmoniously to make the boat glide forward.
The ultimate goal of spiritual awakening is to return to God. This is where the teaching of death and the current of the Tao are leading you. Understand that real knowledge of God only comes from personal experience. You can only know God accurately from the absolute, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent center of Being itself—that is, from God’s own perspective.
Fortunately, you have a direct inner connection that gives you access to God’s perspective. You use this connection by employing the lessons you’ve learned in this book. Through continued practice of these things, an experience of divine union emerges. The veils of your human mind and heart can fall away to reveal the infinite, ineffable joy beyond the finite walls of your psyche.
The results of divine union are awesome:
The best metaphor for the way God views the world and everyone in it, including you, is the sun, which shines equally brightly on all people without discrimination or distinction. Let go once and for all of the idea of a judgmental God. As you go forward into a life of spiritual awakening, let this thought change your life: Since God exists in eternal ecstasy, when He looks at you, what does He see?
We've reorganized this book’s chapter order for coherency. As a reference, here's how the summary chapters correspond to those of the book:
Part 1: Principles of Spiritual Awakening
Part 2: Metaphors and Applications
Part 3: Death, the Tao, and the Divine
Most people are fragmented and unhappy. They lead conflicted lives, driven by a variety of competing motivations and impulses. They would love to follow the advice of Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet to be true to themselves, but they just can’t do it, because Polonius’s advice only works if you really know the self to which you’re supposed to be true.
Fortunately, there’s an infallible expert on the subject of who you really are: you. You’re the only one with direct, firsthand knowledge of what it’s like to be you. In this book, spiritual teacher Michael A. Singer, founder of the Temple of the Universe meditation center and a pioneering figure in the world of medical software, teaches you how to use your direct self-knowledge as an intuitive tool for awakening to your true identity. You’ll learn to free yourself from false identities and the suffering that goes with them, and you’ll learn how to live an enlightened life of peace, joy, creativity, and divine love.
In Part 1 (Chapters 1-5), you’ll learn the basic principles and practices of spiritual awakening. Part 2 (Chapters 6-9) presents multiple metaphoric “takes” on these principles to guide you through various applications to different areas of your life. In Part 3 (Chapters 10-12), you’ll learn about the transformation of your life that comes from realizing who you really are and living from that center of divine bliss.
Bear in mind that this book’s approach is recursive. Many chapters revisit earlier points to review them from different perspectives, providing you with multiple “mirrors” to help you see yourself, your predicament, and your potential for spiritual awakening from different angles.
Currently, your life isn’t your own. It belongs instead to what you might think of as an “inner roommate.” The first step in spiritual awakening is to recognize the voice of this roommate in your head. Because this voice speaks to you as the voice of your own mind, you’ve mistakenly come to believe that it is you.
Your inner roommate hijacks your experience by narrating the world for you. You “hear” it as the endless flow and flux of your thoughts.
Your inner roommate’s narration of your life is a defense mechanism. Your roommate fears and hates the world because of the world’s unpredictability, so it generates an illusion of security to provide a sense of control. It invites you to live in your head instead of the full flow of reality itself by giving you a mentally interpreted model of the world to experience. However, this illusion isn’t satisfying, and ultimately it’s pathological. Your roommate is always liable to find something wrong with any situation and decide it doesn’t want to be there. It finds fault, lack, and offense at your wedding, at your job, at home—everywhere and all the time.
If you give it free rein, your inner roommate will ruin your life.
Your inner roommate’s voice is so close that it can be hard to notice. However, you can choose to “step back” and pay attention to it. The very act of noticing the voice is the beginning of freedom from it. Don’t try to stop the voice through willpower. Such attempts will only encourage it. By simply noticing it instead of fighting it, you disidentify from it and recognize that you are not it. This breaks its hypnotic spell.
The one inside you who is aware of the voice is the doorway to your true identity. Through your awareness of it, the very mental voice that worries and distracts can become the thing that launches you into spiritual awakening. You’ll learn more about this in later chapters. You can also take charge temporarily by “speaking” to yourself with this mental voice. Try it now: Mentally shout “Hello!” and “hear” it in your mind. This is a useful centering technique whenever you’re feeling overwhelmed by racing thoughts.
Building on the above, know that in your inner being, there are two distinct aspects. One is awareness, the witness, the center of what you will and intend. The other is everything else, all the stuff the witness watches.
Rest in this subject-object relationship. Whenever you’re emotionally bothered by anything—jealousy, anger, anxiety—ask yourself, “Who sees this? Who’s witnessing this inner disturbance?” Notice that you aren’t the problem, you’re the witness of it, which means you don’t have to get lost in it. Chapter 2 will teach you more about this subject-object distinction.
Having learned to hear your inner roommate and witness its melodrama, now take some time getting to know this inner companion by listening to it—not to believe what it says, but to learn more about its personality so that you’ll be more savvy about its tendencies. Be warned that when you first try this, your roommate will ask you skeptical questions about why you would do such a thing. It wants to remain hidden by your unconscious identification with it. It’s crafty that way.
Consider personifying your inner roommate. Imagine it talking to you from the outside. Spend a day with that person. What does it say? How does it make you feel? Imagine sitting down to watch your favorite television show with this person. Your roommate decides it wants a snack but then agonizes over what to eat. It remembers unfulfilled responsibilities and feels guilty. It sees a redhead on the screen and launches into an angry story about its ex-spouse. Its thoughts and emotions are random, out of control. Notice that this unstable person tries to control your life. It continually dispenses neurotic advice about everything from your work to your health to your relationships.
Through inner observation, you learn the important lesson that you don’t have to believe, and that you should not believe, what your inner roommate tells you. In fact, your true spiritual growth depends on not believing it. Your inner roommate is obsessed with meaningless things. Most of what it says is a waste of time and energy, or worse, positively harmful. If someone chattered out loud the way your roommate does, you’d think they were crazy. Take a clue from this.
Always remember that the voice isn’t reality. Life will happen as it will happen, regardless of what your mind says about it. The voice is merely a mental commotion about life, not life itself. Even if the voice says nominally “spiritual” things, these are just more empty chatter. Real spiritual growth lies beyond the voice. Until you recognize your inner roommate and decide to free yourself from its drama, you’re not ready for teachings about liberation. But once you’ve recognized it, you can make real use of such teachings.
Chapter 1 taught you to become aware of your “inner roommate” so that you can escape its control. This exercise will help you to apply this awareness.
Mentally “step back” and pay attention to your inner roommate’s voice. What does it talk about? What kind of personality do its words reveal? (Is your inner roommate angry? Arrogant? Self-pitying?)
Remember, your inner roommate is neurotic. When it narrates your experience, it spins everything in a dysfunctional way. What particular hangups does your inner roommate impart to you? (What’s it neurotic about? Your job? Your physical appearance? Your intelligence? Your self-worth?)
Personify your inner roommate: Imagine it as someone sitting next to you. What does it look like? How does it act?
How would it affect your day if this person, with its unhealthy words and behavior, accompanied you everywhere and interpreted your life for you?
Now that you’ve gotten to know your inner roommate, you can focus on getting to know someone even more important: your real self.
For attaining inner freedom, there’s a technique that’s more important than any book or mantra or holy pilgrimage. The technique is actually a question: “Who am I?” Properly used, this “master question” will reveal your true identity.
Consider: You aren’t actually your name. Wouldn’t you still be the same person if you had been given a different name? Who are you apart from your name?
You aren’t actually your biography. Wouldn’t you still be the same person if you had gone to a different school or married someone else? Who are you apart from your biography?
At base, the master question asks you to pay attention to something you might not otherwise consider: The mystery of who sees, hears, and knows when you see, hear, and know. It asks, “Who am I really, at my core?”
Here are some right ways to ask the master question:
Ask “Who am I?” about yourself in relation to the outer world. Consider your changing physical appearance as you age, and contrast this with your sense of inward continuity. Your reflection in a mirror is different than it was when you were 10, but you still feel like the same person. Who is it that remains constant on the inside as you age on the outside?
Ask “Who am I?” about yourself in relation to your inner world. When you love, who feels that love? When you’re afraid, who feels that fear?
Consider your ability to lose yourself in thought, and contrast this with the continuity of your pure awareness. Descartes (“I think, therefore I am”) was wrong. You can know that you aren’t your thoughts because you can observe your thoughts, and when thinking sometimes stops, you’re still here. Your consciousness still exists. Who is the thinker separate from your thoughts?
Consider your ability to lose yourself as you read these very words. Your mind can become immersed in the reading, but when you stop reading, you’re still here. Who is the reader separate from the reading?
Consider the status of you in relation to your dreams. When you dream during sleep, you’re immersed in the experience, but when you wake up, you know the dream was just something that you “had.” Who is the dreamer who experiences the dream?
When you ask it truly and deeply, the question becomes, “Who is having all of these mental, emotional, and physical experiences right now?”
Having asked the question correctly, just let go of all experiences and notice what’s left: the pure experiencer. Notice that this experiencer has a certain quality: consciousness, an intuitive sense of existing. Notice that this pure experiencer can instantaneously apprehend richly complex scenes that would require a lot of time and effort for the thinking mind. Look around the room or out the window. Wordlessly receive what you see. Notice how the experiencer encompasses perceptions effortlessly.
When you understand what the master question is really asking, and when you employ it correctly, the answer eventually offers itself: You are the one who sees. You are the witness, the one seated at the center of consciousness. From there, you look outward at your thoughts, then further outward at your emotions, then still further outward, through your physical senses, at the external world.
You are the one “behind” your thoughts, emotions, and sensory impressions, the one who perceives them all and remains constant as they arise and pass away. You aren’t any object of experience. Instead, you’re the one who is “inside,” looking out at the world of experiences. You’re the subject that perceives all objects. This One at the center is the Judeo-Christian Soul, the Hindu Atman, the Buddhist Self.
In Chapter 1, you learned that the first step in spiritual awakening is to recognize your inner roommate, which then enables you to begin recognizing your real self. Now it’s time to learn about the most important thing in your actual experience of life: your inner energy. True spiritual traditions are all about inner energy and how to open yourself up to it. All the great traditions talk about this energy under different names (Chi in Chinese medicine, Shakti in yoga, Spirit in the West).
Inner energy behaves by surging and receding, depending on the condition of your spiritual heart (see below). When the energy flows, you feel supercharged and able to take on the world. When it doesn’t, you feel drained and depressed. You can know its current state within you by paying attention to your relative level of vitality, joy, and inspiration. In Chapter 5, you’ll learn how the flow of your inner energy determines your level of happiness.
This energy has laws and follows patterned behavior just like physical energy in the outer world. It’s an underlying field, analogous to the field of atomic energy that underlies the physical realm. The energy’s movements create your mental-emotional patterns and your inner drives and instincts, such as the survival instinct shared by all living species. Over the course of human evolutionary history, the survival instinct has largely shifted from physiological protection to psychological protection. We defend not our physical lives but our egos, our self-concepts. Instead of outside threats, we struggle against inner ones in the form of fears, insecurities, and damaging behavioral patterns.
Inner energy’s source is different from the calories in your food. You draw on inner energy from the inside. It’s always available to everyone. It doesn’t depend on your age or moral behavior. Like the sun, it shines on everybody. The only difference is that you can block it (as we’ll explore below).
Your body contains centers or nodes of this energy, like spiritual valves that open and close. Yogis call them chakras. Energy focuses, distributes, and flows through these centers.
You can better understand inner energy, and how you unwittingly shut yourself off from it, by paying attention to the heart chakra or spiritual heart. This is the chakra that you’re most familiar with from daily life. Your spiritual heart is an exquisite regulator of your experience. It governs your life because it opens and closes in sync with human relationships.
The only reason why you don’t feel inner energy all the time is that you block it by closing your heart and mind. You block it because you choose to—but unconsciously. To you, it seems like the opening or closing happens on its own, outside your control.
Your spiritual heart closes because it stores up and becomes blocked by unfinished energy patterns from your past. Your sensory experiences of external events are an intake of energy patterns. Your senses are like electronic devices that transmit these patterns into your inner world. Ideally, we would all live completely in the present and experience the flow of these incoming patterns as a gift, like a wonderful movie. We would let them flow through us without clinging or resisting. But instead, we get hung up. Our thoughts and emotions call some patterns desirable and others undesirable. We resist the former and cling to the latter. Both responses create a block inside us.
Put differently, you close because your past programming (as evident in your inner roommate’s neurotic chatter) tells you the lie that your inner state of openness or closedness depends on what happens to you.
For example, you may close if you lose your job and your programming says you should feel sad about it. But then you find a new job, and you’re happy about it, so suddenly you’re open and energized again. In reality, the external events didn’t cause these reactions. Rather, you unconsciously allowed your mind to use those events as triggers.
Another example: You’re feeling fine as you drive down the street, but then you notice a parked blue Mustang. It looks like your girlfriend’s. You see two people hugging in the front seat. Your past programming for jealousy kicks in: Was that really your girlfriend hugging someone else? You’ll never know, you’ve already driven past. But now you’re hung up on the thought and booted out of the present moment. Instead of seeing the street as you drive, you’re fixating on the emotionally charged memory of that one visual impression.
Blockages make you hypersensitive to imagined injuries. Consider your survival instinct again. Despite its evolutionary shift from bodily to psychological protection, this energy pattern still produces the same physical response. When our ideas or identities are attacked, we experience the same fear, the same adrenalized fight-or-flight reaction. This protective response is tremendously unbalanced; we worry about insubstantial non-threats such as what people will think of us or how we sounded to them. We’re like psychological hypochondriacs.
A buildup of blockages affects your entire life. Once a block is established, your present experience will always be polluted by it until you release the block and allow the free flow of experience through your consciousness again. Remember your crazy inner roommate and its neurotic hangups? Now you have a vocabulary to describe your roommate’s problem: Its heart is filled with blockages. In fact, you could say that your inner roommate is just one, giant blockage.
The concept of Samskaras from the yogic tradition provides a useful handle for understanding blockages. Like the orbital energy patterns of atoms and planets, a Samskara is a stable cycle of blocked energy patterns. Over the course of your life, you’ve stored many of these in your heart. Here’s how Samskaras occur:
You don’t have to live at the mercy of circumstances and Samskaras. You can choose to reject the lie that there’s any energy you need to block. How much inner energy do you want? How much love and enthusiasm? It’s yours for the taking.
Realize that you’ll never become free by trying to protect yourself. Self-protection will only lock you inside with your darkness. Instead, become conscious of the part of you that’s devoted to self-protection, and make the decision to give that up.
Learn to relax and release. Handle Samskaras by letting go of the old, stored energies whenever they come up in the course of daily life.
To return to the previous example of the blue Mustang: Be happy and grateful when the sight of a blue Mustang brings back the old jealousy. Recognize this as an opportunity for healing. Allow yourself to fully experience everything that wants to flow through you, without clinging or resisting.
Cultivate this process of spiritual purging and cleansing until it becomes your automatic, default approach. Learn to let your entire psyche surface. Accept anything that wants to present itself, no matter how unpleasant it feels at first. It might be helpful to initially practice this discipline with small upsets, like accidentally locking your keys in your car. Then progress to bigger ones like broken relationships and the death of loved ones.
Ultimately, the best and simplest method for staying open is never to close. Closing is just a habit that you can break through training and discipline—for example, through meditation and the practice of awareness by asking the master question, “Who am I?”
Remaining open carries many blessings.
In Chapter 3, you learned about inner energy and the way your spiritual heart either blocks it or lets it flow. This exercise leads you to become more acquainted with your heart and its blockages.
What are some typical situations where you feel your inner energy flow freely? (What situations tend to make you feel inspired, joyful, confident?)
What situations have become triggers for blocking your inner energy flow? (What are some typical situations where you feel your energy vanish so that you feel drained, depressed, and defeated?)
Pick one of your low-energy situations and reflect on it. Why that situation? What life experiences have created this Samskara? What negative emotion is involved? (Anger? Jealousy? Fear?)
Focusing your attention on the blockage will actually activate the stored negative energy. Do that now. But don’t react to the energy that arises. Instead, just feel it and observe it. Then report: What happens to the negative energy when you do this?
Just like your cycles of closing and opening, for most of us, life is a recurring cycle of falling and rising. We cycle repeatedly into states of unhappiness and dysfunction and then rise again to a relative state of clarity and ease. It’s a traumatic and futile way to live. But fortunately, it doesn’t have to be like this.
The fall into unhappiness is actually a fall into unawareness. Here’s how it happens:
A series of cascading crises can occur if your life hits another blockage while you’re already down and you make life decisions from that negative state. Now you’re not just fallen, you’re caught in a downward spiral. Thoughts may come about changing your life, leaving your spouse, quitting your job, because you mistakenly see the outer circumstance as the cause of your problem. But when you act from that inner darkness, you don’t solve anything. In fact, you intensify the problem and fall to an even lower level, because now you’re putting the negativity out and stimulating reactions in kind from others. You misunderstand people’s words and motivations. You speak harshly. You act unwisely. You burn bridges. And whatever you put out into the world comes back.
Falling and rising is all about fear and resistance: You fall because you fear life and therefore resist it. Change is the nature of life, but you fear change because of its inherent uncertainty, so you use your mind to create a false world of static stability. Recall the way your inner roommate fears the world and wants to experience a “safer” (mentally interpreted). You fail to realize that with this mental ruse, you actually make the world a scary place. Instead of recognizing fear as just another object that you can release, you unconsciously hold onto it and spend energy trying not to stimulate it. This leads you to project your fear onto the outer world and see the world itself as the source. You’ve just created another trigger.
You thus end up defining reality according to your own inner problems: What doesn’t disturb you is okay. What disturbs you isn’t okay. So you try to arrange people, places, and things so they don’t trigger your sense of being disturbed, and in doing this you make life itself into a threat. This means the cause of literally every problem—prejudices, negative emotions, whatever—is fear.
Freedom from fear is possible, and thus freedom from falling is possible. It simply means refusing to fight with life. Think of the whole thing as a game in which an important law is: When life hits your stored negativity (your heart blocks), let the negativity go right then, because it will be harder to do it later. The operative principles are as follows:
You can actually learn to “fall upward” into ever more delightful levels of enlightenment. The whole purpose of spiritual evolution is to remove your blockages and set you free. Spiritual growth comes when you recognize and embrace life’s assault on these blockages.
Life will inevitably hit your triggers. This also means life will automatically and effortlessly bring liberation if you let it. Just surrender. Let your blockages and disturbances become the very fuel for your journey to freedom as your act of releasing them propels you upward into clarity and joy. Real transformation comes from accepting your personal problems as the change agents that precipitate your growth. If you fail sometimes in this practice and find yourself falling downward again, just let that go, too. Failures are nothing but more fuel for the upward journey.
In Chapter 11 you’ll learn more about rising and falling by learning about the Tao, the Middle Way, and how to align yourself with it.
You can view the principles of opening and closing, and of falling and rising, as specific components and/or alternative expressions of a broader principle that rules your life and represents the path to your salvation. It’s actually a dual principle: nonresistance plus unconditional happiness.
This dual principle evokes one of the most important lessons you’ll ever learn: Life itself—not some exotic adventure or pursuit, but just your daily life—is the highest spiritual path. And your choice to enjoy your daily life is the greatest spiritual teacher. Life will liberate you if you know how to ask the right question and give the right answer. The question is, “Do I want to be happy?” The answer is an unconditional, “Yes!” You give this answer by practicing total nonresistance.
To understand nonresistance, first understand what resistance is. The thing in you that has the ability to resist life is actually the Self, your true identity. Put differently, it’s willpower, the force that you use to move your arms, legs, and thoughts. Will is the concentrated power of the Self, directed into the mental, physical, and/or emotional realms. You can misuse will to resist the flow of life.
Realize that you don’t actually resist life itself. That’s impossible. What you resist is the experience of life, the impressions life makes on you. You assert your will to resist life’s impressions, and this creates a block in your psyche.
To find happiness, you must reject resistance. When you identify specific areas of resistance in your life, immediately work to clear these out. The benefits will extend to the rest of your experience.
Imagine, for instance, that a childhood experience instilled a fear of dogs in you. You can work with this, learning to relax and have a new and enjoyable relationship with dogs. Then, whenever someone says or does something you don’t like, you can treat this the same way you’ve treated your fear of dogs: no resistance.
In most situations, there’s really nothing to deal with except your own desires and fears, which make everything seem complicated. Without desires and fears, life would just happen naturally, with no problems.
Anytime you notice any part of yourself growing unhappy, drop the unhappiness like a hot coal. For help in doing this, use any number of specific spiritual practices that seem helpful, such as affirmations or meditation. Formal meditation techniques might be especially helpful, as they’ll build the muscles of your awareness that enable you to recognize when unhappiness is trying to take root in you. Just remember that all such techniques and practices are means, not ends.
Use what you’ve learned about inner energy. Refuse to close your spiritual heart, no matter what happens. Refuse the siren call to fall into unhappiness and dysfunction. Refuse to build up new Samskaras, those knots of negative energy that you generate by resisting life. Recognize when something activates one of your existing Samskaras and tempts you to identify with a limited and distorted view of things. Remember that nothing makes you close and that there’s literally nothing worth closing over. Remain alert and savvy to your mind’s attempts to convince you otherwise.
Practice what you’ve learned about recognizing your neurotic inner roommate and its voice. Your inner roommate loves melodrama, but unconditional happiness means giving that up to live in peace.
Great areas for practicing nonresistance and dropping unhappiness include your relationships and your work. Also remember that your real work is what’s left to do after everything else passes through you. As you practice nonresistance and unconditional happiness, you’ll discover that new talents and abilities emerge for doing this work.
View your life this way: You’ve taken a vow of happiness. And because of this, life will test you. You’ll miss your flight. Somebody will put a dent in your new car. Are you going to remain faithful to your vow? It’s as simple as that.
Remember that giving an unconditional “yes” to happiness is itself the highest spiritual technique and the surest way to awakening. Practice any other techniques in service to this one.
By practicing nonresistance and dropping unhappiness, you can choose to be happy. If you place limits or conditions on your happiness—you can’t be happy if your spouse leaves you, or if your car breaks down—then that’s on you. You can’t control those things, but you can refuse to give them power over your happiness. You can remain happy no matter what, even if people starve you and put you in solitary confinement. Reflect on the examples of people throughout history, such as Gandhi, who have remained happy even in the face of persecution and deprivation.
The only rational response to life here on this planet spinning through empty space in a vast universe is to enjoy it. There’s ultimately no legitimate reason to resist life, no reason to close your heart and enable the buildup of tension that leads to unhappiness. Imagine what you could achieve if you liberated the energy that you’ve been diverting into resisting life.
Part 1 of this summary taught you the basic principles of spiritual awakening. Part 2 processes these principles through a succession of metaphors to clarify their application to various parts of your life.
An accurate way to characterize your regular daily experience is to say that you’re sleepwalking through life. You’re essentially lost in a dream. Your ability to get “lost” like this is a native one that you’ve had since birth. When you focus consciousness intensely on any object, you lose your sense of self-awareness in it. For example, when you really get into reading a book, you “lose” yourself in it and don’t notice the book or your surroundings. The same thing happens when you watch a movie. The same thing happens in daily life when you lose yourself in the flow of objects and events around you.
Notice especially that you don’t just lose yourself in external objects. This happens not just with physical objects but with mental objects (thoughts and emotions), which are often caused by outer events. Remember the three layers or levels of experience: thoughts, emotions, and sensory impressions. Your consciousness is able to focus on objects at all three levels
You could also say that you’re lost in an all-encompassing movie. It’s a movie that uses not only sight and sound but your other senses. And even more, it’s a movie that “projects” onto your thoughts and emotions. These components are all synchronized. No object of your consciousness deviates from the story, so the story completely envelopes you. There’s not even a “you” left who could think an independent thought such as, “I don’t like this movie, I want out,” because your thoughts are the movie’s thoughts.
The phenomenon of lucid dreaming offers a useful analogy for spiritual awakening from this state of unconsciousness. In a lucid dream, you become aware that you’re dreaming as opposed to being fully immersed. Similarly, you wake up in the dream of your life by learning to reverse the direction of awareness so that you “shine its light” not on any object of consciousness, but back upon consciousness itself. You become aware of your awareness. It’s like being lost in a movie but then “coming to yourself” and remembering that you’re watching a fictional story on a screen. Remember the lessons of the master question (“Who am I?”): When you wake up spiritually, you live your daily life in awareness of yourself as the witnessing subject who experiences the flux of things instead of being fully immersed in them.
When you wake up spiritually, you see and experience your life in a different way. You realize that the person you’ve always thought of as yourself is, in essence, just a dream or a movie. It’s a movie titled [Insert Your Name].
For true spiritual growth, you must come to peace with pain, because you’ve built your whole life on it. From childhood, you have unconsciously built your thoughts, actions, and beliefs around avoiding a layer of pain in your heart. Your personality, behavior patterns, way of dressing and talking—you built them all on avoiding pain. Spiritual growth requires you to embrace this pain, and more, to transcend it.
For a more vivid understanding of your pain and its effects, imagine that you have a thorn embedded in your arm, right on a nerve. It’s a serious, impairing problem. Should you handle the pain by removing the thorn, or by making sure nothing touches it?
If you decide to protect the thorn, this work will consume your life. Any behavior pattern for avoiding pain will actually become a doorway for that pain to enter, because when you attempt to avoid your deep pain, you build layers of sensitivity around it.
In real life, you have just such a thorn. It’s made up of your Samskaras, those blocked energies in your heart from stored-up past impressions. This is why your days are precarious as you navigate through potential pain points at every turn: You’ve chosen to protect your thorn, so you’ve made your life a minefield of pain.
For example, if your pain is about feelings of rejection, you may build a busy social schedule. You may dress, act, and talk in ways that your mind thinks will earn your friends’ approval. And with these instinctive actions, you’ve now sensitized all of these areas with your original pain, so that any one of them can now make you suffer. Other real-life examples might include sensitivities about loneliness, your physical appearance, your level of ability, or your intelligence. You have the same two choices with all: Either build your life around protecting yourself from the pain, or remove its source.
If you choose a life of protecting your thorn, you’ll build a thorn-shaped life as your daily actions revolve around shielding the painful spot. Your thoughts and relationships will be about it. Your whole life will become a reflection of it. Instead of solving the problem, you’ll make it the center of your universe. For example, if you suffer from loneliness, but instead of removing that thorn, you build your life around protecting yourself from the pain, you might keep people at a distance. You might marry someone who makes you feel the least lonely, but then you’ll spend your whole marriage trying to please your spouse in order to avoid abandonment. And/or you’ll create a permanent state of emotional distance to preemptively protect yourself while making manipulative attempts to ensure the other person’s devotion. Your life will be shaped around your thorn.
To free yourself from a life of pain, employ the principles that you’ve already learned in this book, which can take on a variety of practical forms.
Use the events and encounters of your daily life as opportunities for liberation (remember Chapter 5 on nonresistance and unconditional happiness). Even watching a television show where the story arouses the pain of an inner thorn represents a chance for you to release the pain. Learn to watch the sensitive part of you. Notice when it’s feeling a disturbance, such as jealousy, lack, or fear. Use these opportunities as they arise.
Release the initial pain early to avoid being trapped in the long term. The longer you wait, the harder it will be to let it go. Remember, if you let your spiritual heart close around something, you’ll be psychologically sensitive about that thing going forward.
Learn that it’s okay to feel inner disturbances because they don’t disturb the seat of your consciousness. This is true freedom, the kind that comes not from solving your problems on the level where they present themselves, but from transcending them. Rest in the fact that you aren’t the pain of your thorn, nor are you the thorn itself. Instead, you’re the one who sees these things. And since inner thorns are just blocked energy from the past, you can release them. You don’t have to fear them. They’re just more things to be observed in the universe. View pain as energy passing through your heart before the gaze of consciousness. Instead of contracting and closing and damming up the energy, relax and let it go. Sometimes you can feel a palpable heat inside you as you release pain. It’s called “The fire of yoga,” and it’s the feeling of pain being purified. Learn to enjoy it.
Finally, get some perspective. Go outside on a clear night and look up. Cultivate a proper sense of the massive scale of the universe and your relative insignificance within it. Do you really need—do you really want—to spend your life avoiding pain by choosing certain clothes?
In addition to deep pain, you have beauty, peace, freedom, and ecstasy inside you. They’re on the other side of the pain. You have to go through the pain to find your true greatness. When you find there’s a vast ocean of love beyond the fear and pain, you’ll encounter breathtakingly beautiful experiences. You’ll forge a personal relationship with this inner force of beauty, and it will replace your current relationship with inner pain. Peace and love will now run your life.
In Chapter 7, you learned that any behavior pattern for avoiding stored up pain will actually become a doorway for that pain to enter your life. For example, if you’re sensitive about your weight, you’ll experience pain every time the subject of your weight comes up. This exercise will help you to identify and deal with your own pain points.
What’s one area of your life where you’re especially sensitive and liable to feel pain? (Is it shame over your appearance? Lack of self-confidence?)
How have you inadvertently built pain points through your life around this pain? In what areas have you arranged your life—your interpersonal relationships, your schedule, your career, your thoughts—around the desire to avoid the pain?
What specific events and encounters in your daily life might be useful opportunities to release this pain because they tend to bring it up?
In Chapter 1, you learned about your “neurotic inner roommate,” which is simply a colorful way of characterizing your psyche. A vivid way to describe your current relationship to this roommate is to say that you’re addicted to it. Your psyche makes constant demands, and you’ve devoted your life to meeting them.
You’re “addicted” to your psyche because you mistakenly think your psyche protects you from pain. But in fact, your psyche is pain. You need to realize that your psyche is very ill, as evidenced by its extreme sensitivity. When your physical body is healthy, you tend not to notice it. You only notice it when there’s a problem. The fact that you frequently notice your psyche because of mental-emotional pain—anger, embarrassment, anxiety—shows you just how unwell it is.
Your psyche’s illness comes from fear and resistance. In learning about nonresistance and unconditional happiness, you learned that your mind is unwell because you’ve given it the impossible job of creating a secure world by resisting life, by trying to make everyone and everything do what you want. You’ve set your psyche the task of conforming the whole world to your sensitivities.
The good news is that you can break this addiction to your psyche. You do this in the same straightforward way that you’d quit any bad habit: You just stop. Like refusing to put another cigarette in your mouth, you stop telling your mind that its job is to fix everything.
Breaking the addiction requires you to wake up and realize that the trouble is in you, not the world. You can’t solve your inner problems by getting better at external games. External changes won’t address the root of your inner problem. If you feel financially insecure and personally lonely, you’ll still feel that way even if your finances improve and you find the “perfect” spouse, because you’ll simply bring your inner problems into that new situation and infect it with negativity. Getting what you think you want doesn’t satisfy you. It just sets the stage for the next round of pain.
Here are some specific practices for giving up your addiction:
Once you’re free from your psyche’s demands, you can wake up and face each day like a vacation. You can enjoy your work and relationships effortlessly. You can fall asleep each night and let everything go. Eventually, your practice of disciplined awareness will lead to a persistently centered consciousness. Like a healthy body, your psyche will just operate naturally, without pain.
As you grow spiritually, you realize that it really is possible to go beyond the disturbances in your psyche, to break the magic spell that your mental world has always wielded over your consciousness. This is what we mean when we talk about “enlightenment.” To discover the reality beyond your psyche, recognize that your psyche is like a fortress or cage that you built for yourself long ago, and that you have mistaken for the whole universe.
Here’s an allegory for your life:
Imagine finding yourself in a beautiful, open, sunny field. You decide to buy it and build your dream house. You build the house of permanent materials and seal its perimeter for energy efficiency. You install a great security system. After you move in, you love your house so much that you start spending all your time inside. You lock the doors and windows, like a fortress, and luxuriate in your self-made environment.
Eventually the lights start to burn out, but you’ve become so accustomed to living inside that you don’t open the window shades because you don’t even want to see the outside anymore. In fact, you can hardly remember the outside world. When the bulbs finally burn out, you use candles. Stress and darkness take a toll on you. Groping around in the dark, you feel constant anxiety.
One day you come across a book in your library that talks about a natural, radiant light “outside,” a light that shines perpetually under its own power. The book even talks about “going outside” to see and bathe in this light. This is totally beyond your comprehension. You’ve lived in your house for so long that it has become your entire frame of reference. But the book touches something deep within you, filling you with terror and exhilaration.
This allegory describes your real-life situation. Your consciousness is living inside a sealed-off area inside you. You built this inner “house” from thoughts and emotions. The walls are your psyche, the reservoir of your past experiences, beliefs, so on. You live trapped inside your self-concept, your ego—which has become your prison.
You can verify how restrictive your psyche-house is by walking toward one of its walls—say, a fear of heights caused by a fall from a ladder in your youth. Now you’re unable to approach a ladder or go up in a tall building. But if you hear about a reality that exists outside your fortress, you’re both terrified and thrilled with a strange longing.
Your psyche is also like a cage. You’re an animal trapped in a cage that it built for itself. But the bars are invisible, like the buried wires that go with a dog’s shock collar. You only know you’ve hit the edge when you feel a shock.
This analogy describes your real-life state of imprisonment: Your cage consists of the invisible outer limits of your self-concept and your comfort zone. Every day, you devote enormous energy to staying in this comfort zone. Why do you smoke, overeat, fix your hair a certain way, or believe the things you believe? You do all these things because they’re all ways of staying inside the comfort zone of your self-concept.
You hit the invisible walls of your cage when you bump up against anything that threatens this comfort zone. You know you’ve done this when sudden negative emotions disturb you, and also when you dwell on your likes and preferences.
Most people devote their lives to building, rebuilding, and maintaining their prisons. You do these things through resistance. Some experiences pass cleanly through your field of consciousness, but others “stick” due to your likes and dislikes. You cling to these inner objects—impressions, memories—and create thoughts to bind them all together.
You built this prison over your lifetime. Its bars include your self-labels and identity markers: “I’m a woman. I’m a man. I believe in God. I don’t believe in God. I believe in capitalism. I believe in communism.” These are just thoughts that you’ve pulled around you to try and define yourself because you feel lost and want to feel found, because you feel unstable and want to feel stable.
Most societies reward people for how well they cling and build. In fact, societies inculcate the very values that determine what people will think is worth building and clinging to. Societies perpetuate their own mental and emotional structures inside us.
Your clinging and building determine the way you interact with other people. Instead of relating openly, you manipulate. You speak and act in certain ways because you’re trying to get people to behave in ways that confirm your expectations. Another layer of complication is that you treat people not according to who they really are but according to the facades they project. We project these false fronts because we’re all trying to show that we are what others think we ought to be. So very little authentic communication or human relationship ever takes place.
Trying to “hold everything together” by clinging and building is a form of suffering. Clinging and building is exhausting because the inside of your psyche is complex and sophisticated, with constantly shifting moods, desires, and so on. It’s a full-time job to maintain a semblance of discipline over it all. Your efforts are also a Sisyphean exercise in futility, because even though you’re building a “home” for yourself, when you try to find yourself in what you’ve built, you can’t do it. You’re not in the mental world that you’ve built, because you’re the builder.
The very idea that you can cling is ultimately an illusion, because life inherently flows and changes. That’s why you have to spend all your energy trying to keep your house together. Jesus told us not to build our house on sand, but you’ve built your psyche on the ultimate sand, in a pure empty space where there’s actually nothing you hold onto.
From the above, it should be obvious that no one keeps you imprisoned. You are your own jailer. In Chapter 8, you learned to understand your relationship to your psyche as one of addiction. Now realize that your relationship to your inner prison is very much the same: You actually love this prison. You can verify this by noticing your defensive reaction whenever anybody threatens one of your prison walls. Maybe someone contradicts one of your beliefs. You immediately become defensive, attacking the person’s words and maybe the person herself. Maybe your mental model starts to crumble under the weight of uncontrollable events, such as when a loved one dies, someone around whom you’ve built your whole sense of identity. You panic and start repairing your walls with self-talk and rationalizations.
Recall the mistake of defining reality according to your inner problems: Since you originally assembled all the walls and bars (thoughts and emotions) of your prison to create an alternate mental reality, and since this mental model has now become your reality, you label as “bad,” “wrong,” or “unfair” anything that doesn’t confirm it and conform to it.
People who experience real spiritual awakenings wake up to the fact that they are imprisoned. Spirituality is the commitment to escape. Enlightenment is the name for what happens when the walls of your inner prison crumble and you find yourself standing in a field of a trillion glistening stars, gazing at the wondrous infinitude of beauty that your prison has been hiding from you.
To see the light outside your fortress, you need a change in perspective. Instead of viewing your walls as protecting you from infinite darkness, you need to see them as barriers that block out a beautiful, infinite light. Like the dog with the shock collar, realize that your cage walls can’t actually hurt you. If the dog would persist, it would get through the pain and find freedom beyond it. So can you.
Recognize the moments when your mental model of the world starts to crumble as blessings, not threats. If you’ll let life flow, including your thoughts and emotions, you’ll feel fear and panic because your facade will start to crumble, but if you’ll face the panic, you can go beyond it and find a peace that you currently can’t imagine.
Your awareness can expand to encompass your prison and see the light outside it. You don’t have to work for this. Just let life take down your walls every day. Decide not to participate in maintaining and defending your prison. Stop putting a negative label on psychological disturbances. Let them pass through you instead. When reality contradicts your mental model, you have two choices: resist reality or go beyond the model. These are two opposite ways of life. To live spiritually is to give up participating in the struggle of clinging and building.
The way out of the psyche is through self-awareness. Just be the witness and watch the psyche be the psyche. No matter what arises, keep centering yourself with the question, “Who is aware of this?” (a variation of the master question). You can learn to see through the powerful impetus to protect yourself, which gives rise to your entire personality. You can reach the place where you actually watch your psyche being built. You’ll observe the overwhelming desire to select some impressions and not others, and to build your inner fortress from this filtered sample. You’ll recognize some of the planks of your inner house as memories from your childhood, wounds that you once experienced, and so on. Just rest in the depths of your being while watching your mind and heart create their own turmoil.
Imagine having an infinite comfort zone, one that can accommodate anything that happens in your day. No reactivity, no rejection, no clinging. Just a peaceful and inspired interaction with whatever presents itself, in the confidence that you’ll always be fine. Then one day, unexpectedly, you fall through your own walls into the infinite. All the noise and confusion and struggling can stop. You can live without craving or the need to control, without concepts, hopes, or security, with life just happening in each moment. Most people never discover this.
Being totally spiritual means being totally different from everybody else. You don’t want what they want. You accept what they resist. Their lives are about maintaining their mental models. After enlightenment, your life is about letting your model be dismantled.
Once you’re liberated, you can experience a life where waves of love wash up inside you any time you want. This is natural when you go beyond by letting go. You’ll still have a self-concept and thoughts and emotions, but they’ll be just a small part of your total being. You won’t identify with them. Your only identity will be your sense of Self. You’ll never have to worry about anything again. You will have aligned yourself with the forces of creation, and you’ll be at rest in the infinitude of your true Being.
In Chapter 9, you learned about the way your psyche is an inner prison that you built for yourself, and you learned why you unconsciously love it. This exercise will help you to recognize your inner prison and begin to break free.
What are the “walls” of your personal prison built of? (Are they walls of fear? Hope? Despair? Pain? Self-obsession?) Name at least two or three specific walls that you recognize from your regular experience.
How can you tell when your prison’s walls are being threatened? (What kinds of people and situations confront you? What thoughts and emotions come up inside you? How do you find yourself speaking and behaving?)
In what ways do you love your inner prison and cling to it? When threats to its integrity arise, what do you find yourself thinking, saying, and doing to defend and repair it?
How would it feel if you dropped your defense tactics and simply let a threat breach the walls of your prison? Imagine it vividly, and describe your feelings here. (Tip: Afterwards, why not go the full distance and try this tactic in real life?)
Part 2 of this summary supplied a variety of metaphors that you can use to better understand and apply Part 1’s principles of spiritual awakening. In this third and final part, you’ll learn to expand your focus and understand the implications of all these things for the ultimate issues of death, harmonious living, and union with God.
You learned in Chapter 5 that your choice to enjoy life unconditionally is your greatest spiritual teacher. Now realize that you can say the same thing in opposite form: Death is your greatest spiritual teacher. And you don’t have to wait until the end of your life to learn from death. You can do it right now.
Death makes life precious. It doesn’t take things away, it gives them to you. Your life is a tiny blip in an unfolding of reality that’s billions of years old. The reality of death enables you to appreciate the things in your experience of this stupendous cosmic dance that you’ve always taken for granted, the experiences you’ve never really paid attention to because you were stuck in a mental hyperworld where you pursued egocentric unrealities.
Death changes your perspective. If you knew you were going to die tonight, this would change how you view everything. And the fact is, you will die. Maybe in 30 years. Maybe in the next 60 seconds. Let this create the same change in your perspective right now. Let it lead you to straighten your affairs and let go of problems and grudges.
Death changes your priorities and what you think you need. Appreciation of death leads you to give up any desire for “special” experiences that you might miss because of death. It shows you that such desires are what keep you from being fully present for real experiences in each moment.
Death makes you more loving. It makes you more deeply cherish your time with your loved ones. It makes you more present and attentive with them.
Death makes you bolder. When you embrace and live from the fact that you will die, you won’t have any last wishes, because you will have taken risks and achieved your wishes in every moment.
Death makes you really live. For someone who’s truly awakened, the arrival of death doesn’t change anything about how they’ve been living, because a person has already been living fully, saying yes to life, living in the bliss of nonresistance and nonclinging.
To practice the teaching of death, you don’t have to change what you do. Instead, change how you do it and how much of you is present for it. Appreciate walking, breathing, rainfalls, arguments, good food, bad food, literally everything, more intensely than you ever have before. Every moment of your life can fill you completely and touch the very depths of your being, like the experience of finally hearing your favorite classical composition played by your favorite orchestra.
Think of death any time you’re having trouble. Are you experiencing anger or jealousy? Think of what it will be like when you’re dead and gone. This will put the immediate trigger in perspective and elicit compassion for whoever or whatever is inciting your feelings.
Study the words and actions of the great spiritual teachers, who fully embrace death. St. Paul said, “Oh death, where is thy sting? Oh grave, where is thy victory?” Buddhists contemplate the temporal nature of all things. Yogis meditate in graveyards. Take inspiration and guidance from such people.
The Tao Te Ching is one of the deepest of all spiritual texts. “Tao” can be translated as “Way.” The core teaching of the Tao Te Ching is the middle way of balance or moderation. All the great spiritual traditions teach the Tao, whether they call it that or not. When you align yourself with the Tao, your life effortlessly flows along the highest path.
Although it’s hard to capture the subtle concept of the Tao in language, you can approach it by looking at the extremes in any area of life. Consider the subject of food: Do we need food? Yes. Is it possible to eat too much? Yes. Is periodic fasting good? Yes. Is it good never to eat? No. Or consider the question of proximity in human relationships. Closeness is good, but too much closeness can lead to smothering and conflict. Some distance is good, but too much distance can lead to alienation.
The point is that the extreme ends of anything are like the opposite ends of a pendulum swing. The principle of complementary opposites, and of a middle way that holds them together in balance, runs through all phenomena. In Taoist terms, this implicit universal relationship is called the yin and the yang, representing a multitude of paired principles: contraction and expansion, non-doing and doing, weakness and strength, softness and hardness, passivity and activity, darkness and light, female and male, earth and heaven. Neither side is “bad” or “good.” The reality and interaction of the principles of yin and yang is just the nature of the universe.
The Tao is in the middle, the place where there’s no pushing or pulling, no excess in the direction of either of the implicit polar principles of whatever situation you’re contemplating. It’s like the eye of a hurricane: clear, tranquil, and unmoved as all things swirl around it.
Most people’s lives are stressful and difficult because they ride daily pendulum swings from side to side as they let events disturb them. This imbalance causes not only suffering but futility, because when you spend energy trying to maintain an extreme, you go nowhere. You end up serving the extreme itself instead of following the Tao through the middle. For example, if someone smokes for years, spends enormous time and money on it, then decides to quit, they’ll feel they have to engage in a huge motion in the other direction—applying self-discipline, wearing nicotine patches, undergoing hypnotherapy—to counterbalance the energy they’ve put into smoking and direct it back toward the middle.
Such struggles are unnecessary. Remember what you’ve already learned about nonresistance, rising, and falling. You can learn to rise by cooperating with the events and energies of life instead of resisting them and letting them drag you down into unconsciousness. You can align with the Tao.
To balance any unbalanced energy, just let it balance itself. Practice what you’ve learned about dropping resistance, unhappiness, and negativity so that you begin to “fall upward.” You don’t have to stop the swinging pendulum through effort. It will naturally come to rest at the center when you stop pushing it.
When you align with the Tao and learn to rest in it, you uncover vast reservoirs of energy and efficiency. You’re no longer caught by side eddies of energy that take you the long way around. What takes other people hours might take you minutes. What wears other people out leaves you energized. Life becomes clearer. More energy flows through you. Events no longer confuse or overwhelm you. This principle applies to all of life: to eating, sleeping, sex, work, relationships, and everything else. It’s in the middle way of the Tao that you find a life of restful joy and growth.
Resting in the Tao is like sailing a boat. Multiple forces and factors are involved—the sail, the rudder, the rope tension, the wind. This tremendous interplay of forces can result in failure. If anything is unbalanced, there’s no forward motion. You may even capsize the boat. But when it all comes together rightly, the forces align and the boat glides forward beautifully.
Like the sailboat’s motion, moving with the Tao isn’t static. The balance of the middle way is a dynamic equilibrium. Without burden or stress, with effortless action, life happens, and you move with it.
Constantly examine yourself to see whether you’re living in this middle way or getting lost in the extremes. Learn to be “blind” by trusting the Tao and its guidance. You can never know where the Tao is going. You can only move with it. Life in this mode becomes a continual unfolding of surprise and delight.
The ultimate goal of spiritual awakening is to return to God. This is where the teaching of death and the current of the Tao are leading you. Books and ideas about God disagree with each other, so real knowledge of God only comes from personal experience. You can only know God accurately from the absolute, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent center of Being itself—that is, from God’s own perspective.
Fortunately, you have a direct inner connection that gives you access to this divine perspective. You can use this connection by employing the lessons you’ve learned in this book. You can disidentify from your body and psyche and find your real identity beyond the personal self. In doing this, you can initiate a transformation in which you release your stored negativity as your spirit drifts upward, away from anxiety, unhappiness, and the other “lower vibrations” of your being toward a life of peace and happiness.
From continued practice of these things, an experience of divine union emerges. The veils of your human mind and heart fall away to reveal the infinite, ineffable joy beyond the finite walls of your psyche. You discover the realm of Heaven, Paradise, Nirvana. You now understand the exalted experiences of divine union that saints and scriptures throughout history—the New Testament, the Kabbalah, the Hindu Vedas, the Sufi mystics—have all talked about, such as Jesus’s assertion that his words and actions were not his own but his Father’s because “I and my Father are one.” Now you know that you’re not separate from God but are like a drop of water returning to the ocean. Your sense of “I,” of separate identity, is swallowed in God.
The return to God produces an authentic transformation in your experience of life. You now feel less angry, fearful, resentful, and self-conscious. You’re less reactive because you’re less bound to your earthly self. You begin to center yourself more in your spiritual being, not through effort, but just naturally.
You now experience the ecstasy that God knows when He looks at the world. As you return to God through openness and unconditional happiness, you automatically move through the different stages of yoga. Shakti (Spirit) awakens and purifies your mind and heart, enabling you to take pleasure in God’s creation. Waves of positive energy roll through you. In learning to be joyful in all things, you experientially understand the ancient yogic name for God: Satchitananda—being-consciousness-bliss—eternal, conscious joy.
You walk around feeling openness, lightness, and causeless love—love for no external reason. You see and know all creation as a proliferation of beauty. You respect and cherish all people and things. You stop judging and differentiating. You see and experience every child, person, leaf, rock, and passing phenomenon as its own object of absolute love. You love everything unconditionally, like the love of a mother for a child who’s mentally or physically challenged. To her, the child is beautiful. She doesn’t see anything wrong with this glorious, beloved child. That’s how God sees all of creation, and how you will see it in union with God.
This causeless love is the same as that of Christ, who revealed the heart of his Father through a life that was a unified effusion of selfless love and compassion. Christ taught the parable of the prodigal son, who squandered his father’s wealth, but then his father welcomed him back home and treated him better than the son who had stayed. When the woman was caught in adultery, Christ said to the angry crowd, “Whoever is without sin among you, cast the first stone.” As he hung on the cross, Christ said, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.”
As you share Christ’s love, you realize that in your daily, practical life you can see with God’s eyes and give with God’s hands. When you feel God’s love, there’s nothing you wouldn’t give. And you know beyond doubt that these eyes and this generosity are not yours. You could never be the source of such infinite love and compassion
The best analogy for the way God sees and relates to the world and everyone in it, including you, is the sun, which shines equally brightly on all people, good and bad, without discrimination. You can choose to look away from the light and live in darkness, but that doesn’t change the sun. It’s still there, still shining on everyone. When you come to your senses and turn back to the light, there’s no punishment. You don’t have to apologize. Just look up. You can’t offend God. If you feel guilt and shame, that’s just your ego blocking the light. You can’t make God stop loving you. Let go once and for all of the idea of a judgmental God.
As you go forward into a life of spiritual awakening, let this question and realization change everything for you: Since God exists in eternal ecstasy, when He looks at you, what does He see?
The last three chapters advised you to recognize death as the greatest spiritual teacher, to follow the “middle way” of the Tao, and to recognize the divine realities that death and the Tao ultimately reveal. This final exercise invites you to dwell further on these things. And more: It invites you to begin acting on them.
Chapter 10 stated that death makes life precious, changes your priorities, changes your perspective, makes you more loving, makes you bolder, and makes you really live. When you personally dwell on the reality of death—both yours and that of others—which of these areas do you find it most strongly affects? (Does it change your priorities or perspective? Does it make you feel bolder or more loving?) How exactly does awareness of death affect you in that part of your life, and why?
Chapter 11 taught you that most people don’t live in the Tao. Instead, they “ride the pendulum” by swinging to extremes, resulting in difficult and stressful lives. Where do you see this happening in your own life? (For instance, are you too angry—or do you not allow yourself to feel healthy anger? Do you get too close to people and suffer from unhealthy codependent relationships—or do you keep yourself too distant from other people?) Describe an area of imbalance in your life.
For the area of imbalance described above, where is the Tao located? How can you follow it?
Ask yourself the question that ends Chapter 12: If God loves the world unconditionally, and God sees and knows everyone and everything from a viewpoint of eternal ecstasy, then when He looks at you, what does He see? Really reflect on this question. Articulate its personal implications for yourself and your life.
How would it affect your life overall if you fully embraced death, followed the Tao, and shared God’s perspective of ecstatic, unconditional love for the world? How would your life right now—the way you think, see, feel, talk, act, and live—change?